


Queen Margaret's Fantastic Automaton

by gersaint



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry VI Part 2 - Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3 - Shakespeare, Historical RPF, Richard III - Shakespeare
Genre: Airships, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Alternate Universe - Wizards, Ambition, Bastardizing Shakespeare, Ghosts, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Necromancy, References to Shakespeare, Resurrection, Robots, Shakespeare Quotations, Witchcraft, Witches, Wizards, accurate and anachronistic dialogue at the same time, anne neville is the new and improved lady macbeth, magic robots that is, magical steampunk, references to nonexistent theological treatises, steampunk in a time period that did not have steam power
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 05:37:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5731375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gersaint/pseuds/gersaint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since the Yorkists’ first barque took to the air, it had been nothing but trouble for the House of Lancaster. How speedily those wooden birds soared, and how accurately they shot down royal commanding officers! Something had to be done. There were plenty of wizards around in this godforsaken country, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If Thou Be'st Death

_If thou be’st death, I’ll give thee England’s treasure,_  
_Enough to purchase such another island,_  
_So thou wilt let me live, and feel no pain._  
_…_  
_Bring me unto my trial when you will._  
_Died he not in his bed? Where should he die?_  
_Can I make men live, whether they will or no?_  
_O, torture me no more! I will confess._  
_Alive again? Then show me where he is:_  
_I’ll give a thousand pound to look upon him._  
_He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them._  
_Comb down his hair; look, look! It stands upright,_  
_Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul._  
_Give me some drink; and bid the apothecary_  
_Bring the strong poison that I bought of him._  
– Cardinal Beaufort (Henry VI part 2)

 

**April 1447**

The fog was unnatural. It had even managed to slither its way inside Wolvesey Castle. Past the walls. Into the stones. Seeping like murder. Soaking the floor in its breath. And there, in the grand bedchamber, lay Cardinal Henry Beaufort, his mind half-rotten and his heart a-throb in his chest. He lifted his shivering, bony hand up to his face and saw fog, fog, nothing but fog! Everything was murky, tinted a slight blue, rippling, swimming, as if the world itself was made of fog and water and the people and objects in it were fishes. Hell is murky, Beaufort had heard it said. Perhaps – just perhaps, he didn’t know, as he’d never yet been to Hell – it wasn’t a place of fire. Perhaps it was a wet place, choked with the bodies of the dead. Humid, misty, foggy.

Gloucester’s ghost had summoned the fog; of that Beaufort was sure. Gloucester was somewhere there in the chamber. But where? At first Beaufort could only see the eyes. Those eyes that glowed like coals. Burning, burning, burning in the furnace of the spirit’s intangible skull. Burning, yet seeing nothing. _He hath no eyes; the dust hath blinded them._ The closer the ghost stepped – or glided – to the cardinal’s sumptuous, canopied bed, the heavier and more carnivorous the silence became.

Beaufort broke the silence. _“If thou be’st death,”_ – he wondered at how raspy his voice was, and yet how loud – _“I’ll give thee England’s treasure, enough to purchase such another island, so thou wilt let me live.”_ The silence pressed down upon him still, so he added, _“And feel no pain.”_

The spirit said nothing. Maybe it was just a trick of the fog’s swimming sea-light, but it looked as though Gloucester’s hair was standing on end. He held a pair of scales in his hand. Though there was nothing in them, the scales were tipped unequally. Gloucester’s face – what Beaufort could see of it, at least – was dark as a shadow. Darker than Hell. Murkier, certainly. As if the good duke had just been suffocated. But Beaufort knew – he _knew_ , damn it – that it had been Suffolk who’d done the deed! Not him. Not His Eminence. Aye, ‘twas too true that he’d been against Gloucester. Who had not been, after all the duke’s indiscretions? He, Beaufort, had simply stood in the hall, itching his nose idly, while a whispered incantation drew all the breath out of the good duke’s body. And yet Suffolk lived.

 _O, torture me no more! I will confess._ They would always say that, when the cardinal died, he cursed his own sins. Not because he repented them, but because they came to steal his last few minutes of blessed sleep before the end.


	2. The Cunning Witch

_What say’st thou, man? Hast thou as yet conferr’d_  
_With Margery Jourdain, the cunning witch,_  
_With Roger Bolingbroke, the conjurer?_  
_And will they undertake to do me good?_  
– Duchess of Gloucester (Henry VI part 2)

 

**October 1460**

Ever since the Yorkists’ first barque took to the air, it had been nothing but trouble for the House of Lancaster. How speedily those wooden birds soared, and how accurately they shot down royal commanding officers! Something had to be done. There were plenty of wizards around in this godforsaken country, after all.

Now, magic had been known to exist since time immemorial. King Henry VI himself had had a close brush with witches back in ‘41, when Eleanor Cobham had played sorceress. The Duchess had been dead for eight years, however, and Margery Jourdemayne’s ashes had long since been scattered to the four winds, when a ship bearing the flag of the White Rose appeared in the sky above the spires of St. Paul’s. All at once, everyone could tell that this was no magic. At least not any kind of magic known to the inhabitants of the sceptered isle.

Queen Margaret was furious, of course. She called all the royal astronomers and astrologers, physicians and musicians, magicians and opticians, stargazers and stained-glass-window-glazers – in short, every learned man in the realm from scholar to gentleman thief was commanded to Kenilworth Castle. Her order was simple: build a flying ship – an airship, as they were known – to rival that of York, whether by magic or craft or any other sort of jugglery that could be employed. Whoever could build the best flying fleet would be generously rewarded for furthering the noble cause of Lancaster.

But, as you may have guessed, nobody in that veritable army of learned men  _could_ complete such a task. For months, England knew no darkness, as all the philosophers and strategists from Newcastle to Dover sat up late at night, burning candles in their holders, wracking their eminent brains over Queen Margaret’s plan. And how _would_ you do something like that? Build a normal ship, attach a thousand pairs of albatross wings to the timbers, and cast a reanimation spell? That had already been tried many a time by the King’s Wizards, and nothing at all had come of it (except for the extinction of the last albatrosses in the North Sea). Meanwhile, the Yorkist airships continued to block out the sun like Persian arrows. The House of Lancaster could not afford to lose any more time.

The queen, though, had a plan. She always did. The royal family, as everyone knew, was well versed in the art of necromancy; indeed, they were the only people in the kingdom who would not be burned at the stake for it. John of Gaunt had resurrected Anne of Bohemia at the order of Richard II, which had displeased the young Queen Isabel very much, unaccustomed as she was to having to share her position with a talking corpse. Henry IV had briefly reanimated Richard II, only to kill him again in front of all London so that the rumors of “Richard yet liveth” would be suppressed. More recently, the Good Duke Humphrey had once tried to resurrect his great brother, Henry V, in a fit of desperation on the fields of France; however, this would have raised too many tricky questions about having two kings of England alive at once, and so Henry VI had had to dissuade his uncle from such an endeavor.

One brisk day in autumn, when the sky was almost a perfect royal blue (if one disregarded the smoke), Queen Margaret caught King Henry in the garden one day. He was reading the penitential Psalms under an olive tree, paying no heed to the creaking of the airships’ wings above his head, nor to the sounds of the English countryside being torn apart by Yorkist fireballs.

“No! No, I will not do it!” Henry protested upon being told of Margaret’s plan.

“But Henry –”

“By Saint John, I have always looked upon raising the dead with suspicion,” said Henry. His soft brown eyes burned with righteous fire, as they always did when a conversation veered into the theological. “Though God must have given men the power of magic for a reason – as the Almighty doth nothing without reason – necromancy seems to me a heathen art. Death should be everlasting! I wish not to be like my ancestors, who full well seemed to think nothing of opening graves for even the strangest deeds, and neither shall I disturb the soul of the wretched Margery Jourdemayne for your purposes.”

“My dear husband,” said Margaret, raising a golden eyebrow, “you are a learned man.” She was as beautiful as a nymph, and as small and aggressive as a wolverine. “You must have read the works of the great wizard Silvanus Ignatius, who was personal chamberlain to twelve successive pharaohs of Egypt before departing this world at the age of fourteen score and five. In his treatise called _In_ _Defence of Necromancy_ , he sets forth a very strong argument in favor of the art of resurrection; in faith, he refutes passing well every one of the common arguments against it. Have you read it?”

Henry got up from his perch under the olive tree and began to pace around the garden. “Aye, that I have,” he said. “But have you, my dear wife, read the work of the theologian and antiquarian Eirenaios Prokopios? He was slain twice in the Holy Land, and twice brought back to life. He did find it so disagreeable to his conscience that he wrote a book in five volumes, called _On Resurrection_ , outlining all the reasons why necromancy is unholy and must not be done by or to any Christian soul.”

Before this royal debate could get any further, the stout and freckled Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, dashed into the garden.

“Your Majesties,” he said, disheveled and out of breath, “I should be loath to disrupt you with my rough presence, and therefore I shall be brief. The rebels are marching on the castle. Their fleet is hiding above the clouds. Half the town is ablaze. I beseech you, hasten from here!”

“Henry,” the queen barked, “if you don’t do something, I will turn you into a toad.”

The king stammered in his usual way, “But I – I know not –”

His words were drowned out by the sound of a fireball shrieking through the air. It came out of the clouds, or so it seemed, landing not ten yards away from Henry, Margaret, and Jasper. The olive tree and all the flowers in the garden were suddenly ash. Everything burned. All was a strange hue of red, orange, and yellow; columns of smoke rose into the sky like vengeful ghosts come to harass the Heavens. Soon enough, everything more or less went black.

 

~

 

These were the events that led to the eventual resurrection of the infamous Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye. That poor woman had once been a talented witch – until Eleanor Cobham came along. Eleanor, newly-minted Duchess of Gloucester, had had a wonderfully large ego but wonderfully little talent for magic; nothing her parents had done in her childhood had worked to make a proper sorceress out of her, and so she had always had to resort to other people’s talents to satisfy her lust for the occult, which was a considerable lust. She had an extensive correspondence with Gilles de Rais, another failed wizard, until the Church found out about his inconvenient penchant for sodomizing and murdering children, and he was promptly hanged. Eleanor had grieved bitterly upon finding out about Gilles’s death – some even said the two had had something between them that was more than just passionate letters about potions. But that’s quite beside the point.

Anyway, back to old Jourdemayne. In the end, it had not taken a lot to get Henry to finally agree to resurrect her – a swift fireball that had nearly forced him to share Jourdemayne’s fate was quite enough. He was still reluctant, it was true; but once the attack of the White Rose was over, he had dutifully dusted himself off and ordered the witch’s ashes to be brought to Kenilworth, along with one of the bones of her fingers.

Finding the ashes was no simple task; the Duke of Somerset, also known as the Royal Detective-General, had whipped and driven his men all around England with their noses to the ground, looking for something that had the slightest resemblance to ash. This was made just a tiny bit easier because the ashes of professional witches, as opposed to that of amateur ones, glowed a very faint green when in shadow. As for the bone, _that_ was safely stored in Henry’s personal cabinet. He was glad to be rid of the thing, for he shuddered every time he opened his cabinet and saw that finger bone. Some three days later, the ashes were triumphantly brought to Henry and Margaret. Somerset gingerly presented the ashes in a small leather pouch. The pouch was taken. Somerset was dismissed with gracious thanks – after which he presumably went to dip his hands into the coldest, cleanest, holiest holy water he could find.

 

~

 

_“Adsum.”_

It was the first word Jourdemayne said with that new mouth of hers. As she moved her lips, she tasted ash on her tongue. The first thing she saw upon waking up from her hellish sojourn through the underworld was something that made her want to go right back under again. It was Henry’s face. His soft, ingenuous, all-too-familiar face (though it was considerably more angular and lined than it had been the last time Jourdemayne had seen it).

 _“_ _By the eternal God, whose name and power thou tremblest at, answer that I shall ask; for, till thou speak, thou shalt not pass from hence,”_ was Henry’s response. He said it in a chiming sort of voice, as if reciting a prayer (though this was as far from a prayer as anything could be). Those were the exact same words Jourdemayne herself had intoned in the presence of the spirit Asmath, some nineteen years ago in the Duchess of Gloucester’s secret chamber. It was the standard formula for greeting newly-summoned spirits, demons, and the like, but it still chilled her to the very bone to hear it pronounced again. Or it would have, if she’d had bones: now she was all ash, except for a skeletal segment of her left index finger.

“So,” Henry continued, rubbing his pale hands together anxiously. His head was still bandaged from the latest catastrophe; it felt heavy and hollow at the same time, and it ached as if the Devil himself had stuck his pitchfork into Henry’s royal forehead. “Terribly sorry to have resurrected you thus. I know ‘tis wondrous rude – and, mind you, I myself am very much against it. A quote from Prokopios comes to mind: _‘Death, and the disturbance of it, are two of the gravest matters in all Christianity.’_ And yes, the pun on ‘grave’ was intentional; the famed scholar was also a famed court jester to Emperor Frederick the First –”

Before Henry could keep waffling on any further, Margaret pushed her way past him to stand closer to the hallowed verge in which Jourdemayne stood.

“Great witch,” said Margaret, “we have need of your magic. And you shall not refuse.”

“Oh? And why shall I not refuse, great queen?”

“Because, until you help us, your foot shall not touch the stones of the underworld again.”

The witch narrowed her eyes; they had once been blue, but now, like every other part of her, they were gray with a slight tinge of green. “I see.”

“And when the House of Lancaster no longer needs you,” Margaret went on, looking the witch steadily in the eyes, “you will be rewarded as handsomely as an undead witch can be. Have we an understanding now?”

Jourdemayne smiled. A thin trail of smoke came out of her mouth. “Yes. We do.”

“Give me your hand, then. Henry, pronounce the incantation.”

The two women joined hands; Margaret’s fair palm was stained with Jourdemayne’s billowing skin. Henry closed his eyes and recited something in a language unheard in many years.

There, in the damp dungeon at Kenilworth, a covenant was sealed between the Queen of England and the Witch of Eye. No power in the earthly world could break it, and none outside this world _would_ break it. The House of Lancaster now had a secret weapon.


End file.
